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Colonies live for 20-30 years, the lifetime of the single queen who produces all the ants, but individual ants live at most a year. In response to perturbations, the behavior of older, larger colonies is more stable than that of younger ones. It is also more homeostatic: the larger the magnitude of the disturbance, the more likely older colonies were to focus on foraging than on responding to the hassles I had created; while, the worse it got, the more the younger colonies reacted. In short, older, larger colonies grow up to act more wisely than younger smaller ones, even though the older colony does not have older, wiser ants.
Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. It is likely that colony behavior matures because colony size changes the rates of interaction among ants. In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic. Perhaps colonies remember a past disturbance because it shifted the location of ants, leading to new patterns of interaction, which might even reinforce the new behavior overnight while the colony is inactive, just as our own memories are consolidated during sleep. Changes in colony behavior due to past events are not the simple sum of ant memories, just as changes in what we remember, and what we say or do, are not a simple set of transformations, neuron by neuron. Instead, your memories are like an ant colony’s: no particular neuron remembers anything although your brain does.

From day to day, the colony’s behavior changes, and what happens on one day affects the next. I conducted a series of perturbation experiments. I put out toothpicks that the workers had to move away, or blocked the trails so that foragers had to work harder, or created a disturbance that the patrollers tried to repel. Each experiment affected only one group of workers directly, but the activity of other groups of workers changed, because workers of one task decide whether to be active depending on their rate of brief encounters with workers of other tasks. After just a few days repeating the experiment, the colonies continued to behave as they did while they were disturbed, even after the perturbations stopped. Ants had switched tasks and positions in the nest, and so the patterns of encounter took a while to shift back to the undisturbed state. No individual ant remembered anything but, in some sense, the colony did.

For the study, 68 healthy participants were trained to associate a sound with an uncomfortable, but not painful, electric shock. Then, they were divided into three groups and either exposed to the same threatening sound, asked to “play the sound in their head,” or asked to imagine pleasant bird and rain sounds – all without experiencing further shocks.
The researchers measured brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Sensors on the skin measured how the body responded.
In the groups that imagined and heard the threatening sounds, brain activity was remarkably similar, with the auditory cortex (which processes sound), the nucleus accumens (which processes fear) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (associated with risk and aversion) all lighting up.
After repeated exposure without the accompanying shock, the subjects in both the real and imagined threat groups experienced what is known as “extinction,” where the formerly fear-inducing stimulus no longer ignited a fear response.

Dopamine's different roles in different circuits

“Our work delineates for the first time the precise brain circuitry in which learning about rewarding and aversive outcomes occurs,” Lammel said. “Having separate neuronal correlates for appetitive and aversive behavior in our brain may explain why we are striving for ever-greater rewards while simultaneously minimizing threats and dangers. Such balanced behavior of approach-and-avoidance learning is surely helpful for surviving competition in a constantly changing environment.”
The newly discovered role for dopamine aligns with an increasing recognition that the neurotransmitter has quite different roles in different areas of the brain, exemplified by its function in voluntary movement, which is affected in Parkinson’s disease. The results also explain earlier conflicting experiments, some of which showed that dopamine increases in response to aversive stimuli, while others did not.

Editing Consciousness: How Bereaved People Control Their Thoughts Without Knowing It - Neuroscience News

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Editing Consciousness: How Bereaved People Control Their Thoughts Without Knowing It
Neuroscience NewsDecember 10, 2018
Artificial Intelligencedeep learningFeaturedmachine learningNeuroscienceneurotechOpen Neuroscience ArticlesPsychology7 min read
Summary: Using machine learning to analyze fMRI brain scans of grieving people, researchers shed light on how unconscious suppression occurs.
Source: Columbia University.
People who are grieving a major loss, such as the death of a spouse or a child, use different coping mechanisms to carry on with their lives. Psychologists have been able to track different approaches, which can reflect different clinical outcomes. One approach that is not usually successful is avoidant grief, a state in which people suffering from grief show marked, effortful, repeated, and often unsuccessful attempts to stop themselves from thinking about their loss. While researchers have shown that avoidant grievers consciously monitor their external environment in order to avoid reminders of their loss, no one has yet been able to show whether these grievers also monitor their mental state unconsciously, trying to block any thoughts of loss from rising to their conscious state.
A new collaborative study between Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Irving Medical Center published online December 7 in SCAN: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience demonstrates that avoidant grievers do unconsciously monitor and block the contents of their mind-wandering, a discovery that could lead to more effective psychiatric treatment for bereaved people. The researchers, who studied 29 bereaved subjects, are the first to show how this unconscious thought suppression occurs. They tracked ongoing processes of mental control as loss-related thoughts came in and out of conscious awareness during a 10-minute period of mind-wandering.
Co-directed by Paul Sajda, professor of biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, and radiology, and John J. Mann, Paul Janssen Professor of Translational Neuroscience (in Psychiatry and in Radiology), the researchers used a new approach to track the interactions between mental processes: a machine-learning approach to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) called “neural decoding,” which establishes a neural pattern or fingerprint that can be used to determine when a given mental process is happening.
“The major challenge of our study was to be able ‘look under the hood’ of a person’s natural mind-wandering state to see what underlying processes were actually controlling their experience,” says Noam Schneck, lead author of the study, a postdoctoral fellow in Sajda’s lab and now assistant professor of clinical medical psychology (in psychiatry) at Columbia University Department of Psychiatry/ New York State Psychiatric Institute. “No one has done this kind of work before, showing this type of consistent control of one mental process–thinking about loss–by another–selective attention–as it happens spontaneously and unconsciously. These findings are significant because they open the door to building a fuller picture of the unconscious mind. We know that the experiences we have arise as a combination of constantly interacting networks. Now we have shown this interaction as it happens naturalistically as well as the way it controls experiences.”
The team recorded fMRI from people who had lost a first-degree relative (a spouse or partner) within the last 14 months. The subjects performed a modified Stroop task, a test widely used in psychology to measure a person’s ability to control the contents of attention, and a separate task presenting pictures and stories of the deceased. Using machine learning, the team then trained respective neural fingerprints for attentional control based on the Stroop task and mental representation of the deceased based on the pictures and stories. The team observed spontaneous fluctuations in these processes that occurred during a neutral mind-wandering fMRI task. They discovered that those with more avoidant grief engaged their attentional control process to block representations of the deceased from conscious awareness.
The brain networks respectively involved in controlling attention towards the deceased (red) and representing the deceased (blue). During a 10-minute period of mind-wandering, avoidant grievers engaged the control network to block representations activated in the representation network from reaching consciousness. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Noam Schneck/Columbia Engineering.
“Our findings show that avoidant grief involves attentional control to reduce the likelihood that deceased-related representations reach full conscious awareness,” says Schneck. “Even though they are not aware of it, avoidant grievers actively control their mental state so that spontaneous thoughts of loss do not enter their consciousness. This kind of tailoring of mind-wandering likely exhausts mental energy and leads to time periods when the thoughts actually do break through. It is like an ineffective pop-up blocker that runs in the background of your computer. You might not be aware that it’s there but it slows down the overall operating speed and eventually breaks down and the pop ups get through.”
The researchers suggest that one treatment goal for avoidant grievers may be to relax the conscious and unconscious mental controls that they maintain over their thinking of the loss. Since this control and monitoring happens outside of conscious awareness, this would be challenging to do, but training in mindfulness and acceptance may help some people relax both their conscious and unconscious mental controls.

Pot withdrawal eased for dependent users | YaleNews

Withdrawal symptoms are marked by craving for marijuana, irritability, anger, depression, insomnia, and decrease in appetite and weight. In 2015, about 4 million people in the United States met the diagnostic criteria for a cannabis use disorder, and almost 150,000 voluntarily sought treatment for their cannabis use.
According to recent national data, approximately one-third of all current cannabis users meet diagnostic criteria for CUD.

from religion to science, faith to progress

Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning. In this respect, Steven Pinker is one of the most religious writers I’ve ever admired. His faith in reason is as complete as any fundamentalist’s belief in God.

"The mammalian and Botryllus blood-forming systems also share hundreds of homologous genes, even though the two species are separated by over 500 million years of evolution," said former postdoctoral scholar Benyamin Rosental, PhD.
Rosental shares lead authorship of the study with graduate student Mark Kowarsky. The senior authors are Irving Weissman, MD, the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Clinical Innovation in Cancer Research and professor of pathology and of developmental biology; Stephen Quake, PhD, the Lee Otterson Professor in the School of Engineering and professor of bioengineering and of applied physics; and senior research scientist Ayelet Voskoboynik, PhD.
The researchers isolated the Botryllus stem cells that are the foundation of its blood and immune system, as well as the progenitor cells they make on their way to becoming adult blood and immune cells. "Out of all the invertebrates, the Botryllus blood stem cells and progenitors are the most similar to vertebrate blood cells, so it is possible, if not likely, that they are the 'missing link' between vertebrates and invertebrates," said Weissman, who also directs the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and the Ludwig Cancer Center at Stanford.

Infections (or Dr-philia?) correlate with mental disturbances

The study showed that children who had been hospitalised with an infection had an 84 per cent increased risk of suffering a mental disorder and a 42 per cent increased risk of being prescribed medicine to treat mental disorders. Furthermore, the risk for a range of specific mental disorders was also higher, including psychotic disorders, OCD, tics, personality disorders, autism and ADHD.

Babies kicking in the womb are creating a map of their bodies -- ScienceDaily

The findings suggest that fetal kicks in the late stages of pregnancy -- the third trimester -- help to grow areas of the brain that deal with sensory input, and are how the baby develops a sense of their own body. The fast brainwaves evoked by the movement disappear by the time babies are a few weeks old.
"Spontaneous movement and consequent feedback from the environment during the early developmental period are known to be necessary for proper brain mapping in animals such as rats. Here we showed that this may be true in humans too," explained study author Dr Lorenzo Fabrizi (UCL Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology).
Kimberley Whitehead (UCL Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology) said: "We think the findings have implications for providing the optimal hospital environment for infants born early, so that they receive appropriate sensory input. For example, it is already routine for infants to be 'nested' in their cots -- this allows them to 'feel' a surface when their limbs kick, as if they were still inside the womb.

Results show that increasing nighttime levels of artificial, outdoor light exposure, stratified by quartile, were associated with an increased prevalence of hypnotic prescriptions and daily dose intake. Furthermore, older adults exposed to higher levels of artificial, outdoor light at night were more likely to use hypnotic drugs for longer periods or higher daily dosages.
"This study observed a significant association between the intensity of outdoor, artificial, nighttime lighting and the prevalence of insomnia as indicated by hypnotic agent prescriptions for older adults in South Korea," said Kyoung-bok Min, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Seoul National University College of Medicine in South Korea. "Our results are supportive data that outdoor, artificial, nighttime light could be linked to sleep deprivation among those while inside the house."

Effective new target for mood-boosting brain stimulation found -- ScienceDaily

"Stimulation induced a pattern of activity in brain regions connected to OFC that was similar to patterns seen when patients naturally experienced positive mood states," says Vikram Rao, of the University of California, San Francisco. "Our findings suggest that OFC is a promising new stimulation target for treatment of mood disorders."
The team led by Rao and Kristin Sellers in the lab of Edward Chang studied 25 patients with epilepsy who had electrodes placed in the brain for medical reasons to pinpoint the origin of their seizures. Many of those patients also suffered from depression, which is often seen in people with epilepsy. With the patients' consent, Chang's team took advantage of those electrodes to deliver small electrical pulses to areas of the brain thought to be involved in regulating mood.
Previous studies have explored deep brain stimulation (DBS) for mood disorders, but its success depends critically on target selection. Targets in other mood-related areas deep in the brain hadn't always led to reliable improvements.
In the new study, the researchers focused their attention and the electrical stimulation on the OFC. The OFC is a key hub for mood-related circuitry. But it's also widely regarded as one of the least well-understood brain regions.
"Although OFC is a more superficial target, it shares rich interconnections with several brain regions implicated in emotion processing," Sellers says. That made this relatively small brain area an attractive target for therapeutic stimulation.
The researchers used the implanted electrodes to stimulate OFC and other brain regions while collecting verbal mood reports and questionnaire scores. Those studies found that unilateral stimulation of the lateral OFC produced acute, dose-dependent mood-state improvement in subjects with moderate-to-severe baseline depression. The changes in brain activity the researchers observed after stimulation closely resembled those seen when people are in a good mood.

A December Night in Chapel Hill

The gathering took place on a bristly cold December night for Chapel Hill. The evening started with a group of carolers, including James and his girlfriend of the moment—yes, it was Joni Mitchell—lighting out from the Taylors’ and rambling through the neighborhood from house to house. Ike went along, too, his voice resonant and booming. It would have been just like my parents to join in such a sing-along. My mother had a beautiful voice, and as my father used to say about singers like himself: If you can’t sing, at least sing loud.
I can imagine the smell of that night, woodsmoke flirting with the December air, the scent of pine and fallen leaves. David was seventeen. His older brother Louis was there, too. So was his friend Isabelle Patterson, whom he had picked up on his motorcycle, much to her dad’s distress. The other Taylor siblings were away, probably up north. As the carolers circled around Morgan Creek, David lip-synched his way through “Silent Night,” in part so that he could listen to James and Joni sing. Why listen to himself when such beautiful voices were ringing out behind his ears? Plus he was Jewish and didn’t know the lyrics.
David had treasured James’s friendship from childhood. When David was seven or eight, he’d been helping a group of older boys build a tree house in the woods near Morgan Creek. When they finished, the boys shooed him away. “This is our clubhouse,” they said. He slunk home, head down. James, then thirteen, walking up the road, saw him. “What’s wrong?” he asked. David told him. “Come with me,” James said. They went to the Taylor house, picked up hammers and nails, and proceeded to build David a tree house of his own.
The carolers stopped by the UNC basketball coach Dean Smith’s midcentury modern. He wasn’t quite as exalted in 1970 as he would become, but he was still local royalty. They sang to Dean and his then-wife, Ann. In the years after that, Smith would sometimes drive players he was recruiting through the neighborhood in one of his Carolina-blue Cadillacs. “That’s James Taylor’s house,” he’d tell them. Late in Smith’s career (and well along in Taylor’s), he said that to a recruit, who responded, “Who’s James Taylor?” “He’s a local musician,” Smith said.
When everyone finished caroling, they went back to the Taylors’, gathering upstairs around the fire in the open living room. Nearby stood a Christmas tree that Ike and James had gone into the woods and cut down. Decades later, Isabelle Patterson would tell David that whenever she hears Joni Mitchell’s song “River” (“It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees”), she’s convinced that the song was inspired by that visit. That evening, David plopped down on the floor next to Joni. She struck him as shy but very kind and very beautiful. “Is this your dulcimer?” he asked.
“Yes, would you like to see it?” she said. She took the dulcimer out of the case and talked a little about it. When she did that, James pulled his guitar out and they began to play together, as they had in London at the Paris Theatre earlier that fall in a concert broadcast by the BBC. They performed “A Case of You,” “California,” and “Carey,” from Joni Mitchell’s forthcoming album, the epochal Blue, which would be released in the summer of 1971.
James and Joni also played “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Fire and Rain,” and a song-in-progress called “Long Ago and Far Away.” David had already been privileged to hear perhaps the first finished version of “Fire and Rain,” which Taylor completed in Chapel Hill after returning from London. He and James’s youngest brother, Hugh, had been hanging out at the Taylors’ when James asked if they wanted to hear a new song. They listened. “Yeah, I think that’ll be a hit,” David told him. That night, when the gathering finally came to a close and the guests got up to leave, James stood up and sang them off with his version of “Happy Trails,” originally performed by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. The guests sang along, my parents included, as they disappeared into the night and the rest of their lives.

People with more knowledge about benefits of physical activity may also exercise more -- ScienceDaily

While the vast majority (99.6%) of participants strongly agreed that physical activity is good for health, most were not aware of all the diseases associated with inactivity. On average, participants correctly identified 13.8 out of 22 diseases associated with a lack of physical activity. Moreover, 55.6% incorrectly answered how much physical activity is needed for health, and 80% of people failed to identify the probabilities of developing diseases without physical activity. A significant association was found between these scores on knowledge of the probabilities of inactivity-related diseases and how active a person was. Future research is needed to determine whether the results hold true equally between men and women, and whether the survey-based data correctly gauges a person's true levels of physical activity.

Touch can produce detailed, lasting memories -- ScienceDaily

Participants showed almost perfect recall on the test that followed the exploration period, correctly identifying the object they had explored 94% of the time. Remarkably, participants still showed robust memory for the original objects 1 week later, with 84% accuracy.
But would they still remember objects so well if they weren't intentionally memorizing them? And could objects that were explored by touch be recognized via a different sensory modality?
In a second experiment, a new group of participants explored the same 168 objects without knowing they would be tested on them. Instead, the experimenters said that they were investigating aesthetic judgments, and they asked the participants to rate the pleasantness of each object based on texture, shape, and weight.
Participants returned 1 week later for a surprise memory test, completing a blindfolded touch-based recognition task for half of the objects. For the rest of the objects, they completed a visual recognition task, in which they saw the original object and a similar object placed on a table, and indicated which one they previously explored. After each trial, the participants also reported if they answered based on recalling details of their touch-based exploration, feeling a vague familiarity, or simply guessing.
Again, the results showed that participants remembered the objects with high accuracy. In the blindfolded test, participants answered correctly on 79% of the trials. In the cross-modal visual test, participants identified the correct object 73% of the time.

"In general, anger was substantially higher for those who were sleep restricted," Krizan said. "We manipulated how annoying the noise was during the task and as expected, people reported more anger when the noise was more unpleasant. When sleep was restricted, people reported even more anger, regardless of the noise."

Wriggly, giggle, puffball: What makes some words funny? Researchers are cracking the science of humor, one word at a time -- ScienceDaily

"We started out by identifying these six categories," said Westbury. "It turns out that the best predictor of funniness is not distance from one of those six categories, but rather average distance from all six categories. This makes sense, because lots of words that people find funny fall into more than one category, like sex and bodily functions -- like boobs."

Are Emotional Disorders Really Disorders of Love? - Mad In America

As family members, therapists or doctors, what if we never again promoted or prescribed drugs as a “treatment” because they ultimately impair our frontal lobes and hence our ability to love? Could we jettison all our ugly, cookie cutter, unloving diagnoses—ADHD, conduct disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and PTSD? Could we instead help others to discover where their loving engagement with life was discouraged or lost and how to revive it or even to experience it for the first time?

Are Emotional Disorders Really Disorders of Love? - Mad In America

I now want to boil down the role of love in our lives into a simple observation: Nearly all human personal or emotional success depends upon being able to give and to accept love, and nearly all human personal failure reflects an inability to do so.
My own working definition of love is “joyful awareness”—the experience of happiness over the existence of something or someone, including whatever or whomever inspires us, from family and friends to nature and God. From experiencing romantic love to admiring heroes who lift our ideals; from enjoying the birds that flit about us in our backyard to watching children or animals play—love is an enthusiastic engagement in life. When we love people and pets, as well as God, we became able not only to give love but also to receive it.

There Are No Shortcuts to Feeling Good at Altitude | Outside Online

For example, if you head from sea level to 7,200 feet, the oxygen saturation of your blood will drop from somewhere in the upper 90s to about 94 percent. That means only 94 percent of the hemoglobin in your arteries is carrying a full load of oxygen. If you then start exercising at a moderate intensity, that number will drop to 89 percent—the equivalent being at 9,800 feet instead of 7,200 feet for the duration of the exercise. So in each of the four groups, half of the subjects were assigned to spend three or four hours a day hiking during the two-day staging period, for an extra altitude boost.
The result of all these machinations? A big fat nothing. All eight of the subgroups produced essentially identical results in the final testing at 14,000 feet.

reSET — a substance use disorder treatment that was the first software-only therapeutic cleared by the FDA — is now commercially available for clinicians to prescribe to their patients, according to a release from Pear Therapeutics and Sandoz, a division of Novartis with which Pear partnered back in April.
But while physical prescription drugs are usually handled through a pharmacy, the process is a bit different for the digital therapeutic, Dr. Yuri Maricich, Pear’s chief medical officer and head of clinical development, told MobiHealthNews. Prescribing physicians will write a script that is sent to Pear’s reSET Connect Patient Service Center, which staffs specialists who guide the patient through downloading and using the app.
Outside of that wrinkle, though, Maricich said that disseminating the treatment to care centers has been “very similar” to how a pharmaceutical company might put a novel treatment into the wild.
“We have a team of salespeople who are going out and educating clinicians about the product, its data, how to use it; and we also have a set of services that support dispensing, but they aren’t selling to the clinicians,” he said. “Also, that dispensing and fulfillment process allows the physician to access the dashboard and the therapeutic for their patient as well. And in the background we [Pear and Sandoz] work with payers around coverage and contracts. So, really, what we’re focusing on now is getting the therapeutic in the hands of patients who need it and helping clinicians understand how to use it, who’s the right patient for it, how do I prescribe it and interact with it as part of standard care.”
Still, Pear and Sandoz seem to be playing it safe with the new treatment modality — beyond general distribution and sales, the Patient Service Center is also equipped talk patients and providers through any questions or troubles they might be having.
“How a patient gets access to [reSET] and how it’s prescribed is new, so we really wanted to try to provide bespoke services to the clinician and the patient,” Maricich explained. “The Patient Service Center is available to help with troubleshooting, they have clinical staff available if there’s clinical questions, and then they also are available if there are complaints or adverse events. So they are, basically, the central node for all of those activities to help clinicians and patients get access to therapeutic and to use it.”
reSET is a 12-week digital cognitive behavioral therapy program accessed through an app and designed to accompany outpatient care delivered by a physician. According to Maricich, it is the only treatment authorized by the FDA for patients aged 18 years and older experiencing addiction to and dependency on stimulants, cannabis and cocaine (as well as alcohol).

Each clinic, which is about the size of a traditional telephone booth, enables users to consult a virtual “AI doctor” that collects health-related data through text and voice interactions. After the AI consultation, the information gathered is reviewed by a human doctor who then provides the relevant diagnosis and prescription online. Customers can buy their medicine from the smart drug-vending machine inside the clinic.

Facebook and The Innovator’s Dilemma - Columbia Journalism Review

Anyone who worked in newspaper publishing over the past twenty years will at some point have found themselves metaphorically beaten about the head with the 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms To Fail, by Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen. The book’s premise, wrapped up in plenty of talk about value creation and S curves, is that companies with big businesses cannot change the basic, successful core functions of those businesses quickly enough to innovate against their coming obsolescence. Newspapers, too, were becoming obsolete, but the grand publishing houses that produced them would not be able to meet the speed required by new technologies (the internet and social media) to adapt.